Month: April 2012

Dishonored is a Rorschach test of a game. Casual observers believe it looks like London during the industrial revolution. (It’s not.) To gamers, it resembles BioShock in some ways. (It does have connection to that first-person shooter.) But even though, Arkane Studios’ latest project reminds players of one thing or another, the game itself is wholly original.

Its takes place in the Steampunk-style locale of Dunwall, a port city that could be confused with the home of Big Ben. Victorian buildings form a jagged skyline with chimneys billowing out grey smoke. It’s a world where instead of fossil fuels, people use whale oil to power their vehicles and devices. Players take on the role of Corvo, who is the bodyguard of the Empress. Well, that is until he’s framed for her murder.

The Lord Regent takes over and ends up being a tyrant. Meanwhile, Corvo has gone into hiding and has been touched by the Outsider, an other-wordly being that visits pivotal people in history. In this case, it’s Corvo and the contact gives him supernatural powers.

Yet, there we were, just a few minutes into the Coldplay concert on Friday night at HP Pavilion in San Jose, being showered with massive amounts of confetti. The downpour seemed like it might never stop, as colorful cutouts of various shapes swirled about in the air, obscuring the view of the stage and creating a scene akin to a World Series victory parade. Continue Reading →

Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi,” often dubbed the gay Jesus play, has been sparking controversy since it debuted in New York 14 years ago. Now a new documentary about a touring version of the show, “Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption,” which opens at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre this weekend, has revived the debate.

Broadway stalwart McNally has long explored aspects of gay culture on stage, notably in his hit “Love! Valour! Compassion.” Here he transports the story of Christ’s life to his hometown in Texas in a meditation on themes of life, death and religion. He sees Jesus as a gay man coping with the repressive culture of the 1950s. In the play, Judas betrays Jesus because of sexual jealousy and Jesus administers a gay marriage between the apostles.

While the show prompted bomb threats in its 1998 debut on the East Coast, there was no such reaction when it played at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre in 2000. Now however the Pennsylvania-based Christian group America Needs Fatima has organized an email petition against the show. On their website, they decry the project as “blasphemy.”

The documentary traces the show, presented by 108 productions, on its tour across the country from small towns to big cities.

In response, local notables such as State Sen. Mark Leno and Supervisor Scott Wiener have rallied in support of the play and the documentary.

Certainly the Bay Area has long been a bastion of cheeky reinventions of religious mythology such as the hunky Jesus competition that takes place every Easter at San Francisco’s Dolores Park.

Leave it to Google to come up with those fun Easter Eggs that delight you. Try searching “zerg rush” today and you’ll see waves of Os rushing your screen. The term references a tactic that Starcraft players use to dominate opponents. It involves building zerglings as quickly as possible and sending them out against opponents before they’re ready. It usually leads to a victory against inexperienced players who don’t defend with towers.

With this Google easter egg, the same sort of thing happens except the Os eat away the text and images on the screen. You can just sit back and watch it happen, but you can also try to defend against them. Click on the Os and watch them lose energy until they die. Defend your base well enough and you get a high score at the end. Afterward, you can share how many Os you defeated and Actions Per Minute, a state used to measure player effectiveness in the game. Check it out. It’s awesome and GG.

Elise Testone, who had flirted with elimination on several occasions in previous weeks, finally walked the plank on Thursday. Her ouster leaves five contestants in the race for the title.

Testone, a 28-year-old rocker chick from Charleston, S.C., probably never did connect with “Idol”‘s younger fans, and certainly didn’t help her cause with a couple of questionable song choices during Wednesday night’s tribute to the rock band Queen.
Testone was part of an all-female Bottom 3 that included Hollie Cavanagh and Skylar Laine. Host Ryan Seacrest reported that a whopping 58 million votes were cast this week by “Idol” fans.

The other singers remaining in the competition are Joshua Ledet, Jessica Sanchez and Phillip Phillips.

Testone may have left the show, but she still has some “Idol” business to tend to. She’ll join the Top 10 finalists on the 45-city summer tour, which was announced on Thursday.

The tour kicks off on July 6 in Detroit and includes stops in Sacramento (July 21) and San Jose (July 22). The latter date represents a homecoming for DeAndre Brackensick, the “Idol” contestant from Oak Grove High School who was eliminated from the competition three weeks ago.

The explosive popularity of League of Legends proves that there’s nothing wrong with free-to-play games. The pricing model made popular in Asia can work in the West just as long as developers create a title that fans want to play.

Trying to mimic the success of LoL as fans like to call it, Las Vegas-based Petroglyph Games is bringing out its own free-to-play real-time strategy game. But this one isn’t based on Defense of the Ancients. End of Nations has a different angle and a wider scope, combining the genre with the mass multiplayer online game.

It definitely has the pedigree for successful. Petroglyph consists of former members of Westwood Studios, the developer responsible for the Command and Conquer series. That means End of Nations is decidedly in the realm of modern warfare, focusing on troops, tanks, choppers and other armored vehicles.

The set lists are different, as are some of the musicians performing them. The star has turned 62, which puts him in the same age bracket as many of his fans. Seventeen studio albums, representing seemingly as many different musical vibes, styles and approaches, have come and gone.

One thing, however, remains defiantly the same for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band:

The explosive Iraq war drama “Black Watch,” staged by the National Theatre of Scotland, and the world premiere of the hip-hop opera “Stuck Elevator” will headline the American Conservatory Theater’s 2012-13 season.

“Black Watch” will be staged in San Francisco’s Armory building in its regional premiere. Gregory Burke wrote the incendiary piece based on interviews with members of the Scottish regiment who served in Iraq. Directed by John Tiffany, the play puts a human face on our military operations in Iraq. A hit from Edinburgh and London to New York, the critically-acclaimed drama runs May 3-June 9, 2013.

“The minute I saw Black Watch I knew A.C.T. had to be a part of bringing this monumental piece of majestic theater to San Francisco, but its demands of setting and size truly had us searching high and low for the right venue,” says ACT artistic director Carey Perloff. “The Armory, a building with a rich history of its own, was the perfect fit to set the stage and enhance the audiences’ experience and their understanding of what happened to the Black Watch soldiers.”

Chay Yew’s “Stuck Elevator” is a hip-hop opera riff based on the true story of a Chinese restaurant deliveryman who became trapped in a New York elevator for 81 hours. Chew collaborates with composer Byron Au Yong and librettist Aaron Jafferis in this gutsy world premiere. The latest avant-garde musical produced at ACT, on the heels of hits including “Black Rider,” “The Overcoat” “Shockheaded Peter,” it runs April 4-28, 2013.

Oscar-winning Olympia Dukakis and ACT core actor Rene Augesen star in Perloff’s take on Sophocle’s tragedy “Elektra” (Nov. 1-25). Translated and adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, and framed by original music by David Lang, Perloff’s staging was created for Los Angeles’ Getty Villa in 2010.

George F. Walker’s “Dead Metaphor” (Jan.17-Feb.10, 2013) is a dark comedy steeped in the hypocrisies of coming home after serving in the war in Iraq. Sniper skills don’t come in very handy in this world premiere, directed by Irene Lewis (“Race”).

And yet Codemasters lies in its own niche. Its games are nowhere near as popular as those three but it manages to stay relevant in its own sphere of influence producing F1 and rally titles, racing offshoots that are popular among gearheads but may not get the mainstream attention of sim racing.

There were probably some disappointed fans when the Gotye show, originally scheduled for the intimate Independent nightclub, was moved to the comparatively massive Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.